1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for providing resistance to the legs of an athlete while training to improve sudden movement, along with a measurement record thereof, and more particularly to a resistance and measurement system conformed to align behind the athlete during his or her accelerating movement.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Those engaged in the training of athletes for sporting endeavors that entail complex body movements may recognize the negative and deleterious effect of fatigue on the efficacy of the training program. Simply, the course of training by sheer repetition of complex or changing movements often fails to obtain the expected result since the onset of fatigue in a muscular grouping is rarely uniform and the imperceptible fatigued muscle compensation then results in all sorts of poor habits. For example, the musculature grouping of a sprinter that may be first involved in a sudden start and thereafter down the track and then the finish includes not just the large leg muscles but also various other smaller ones that control body and joint alignment, and the like, and it is manifestly unlikely that all the involved muscles will coherently tire at the same rate.
This is particularly pronounced amongst the more competitive athletes that by their dedication are constantly working out since most current exercise facilities favor just one or another large muscle group that results in an uneven muscular development in which the smaller ones are deferred to inattention. When strained by repetitive training these transient movement patterns include smaller muscles then invariably tire at a faster rate, resulting in compensatory changes which grossly distort the efficacy of further repetition, to a point where continued training may simply induce improper habits that produce a negative, rather than a positive, result.
Those skilled in the art will appreciate that while prolonged repetitive exercise is effective in the collective training of large muscular groupings, such as those of a long distance runner, the same effect is more difficult to achieve in the training of transient patterns that include those entailed in a sudden start and thereafter the movement down the track for the reasons that I note above. Thus while I and others have described in the past various training systems and mechanisms exemplified in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,652,427 and 5,197,931 issued to me; U.S. Pat. No. 5,217,186 issued to Stewart et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,427,394 issued to Michaelson, and many others, each of these examples relies on training repetition as the driving mechanism for the coordinated development of the whole muscular group. The target efficacy of these mechanisms, therefore, is in the improvement in the most limiting component of the group, a result focused on the development of whole muscle array.
Unlike this coordinated development path where the exercise focus is easily determined by the total time needed to reach a finish line, the dynamics of a sudden lunge out of the starting blocks, for example, present a more difficult analytic assessment. While one may choose a point on the track to somehow quantify these transient, such a measurement alone is simply insufficient as it often hides negative habits that often manifest themselves only much further along the track.
In my prior U.S. Pat. No. 6,652,427 that I have noted above I have described a resistance arrangement useful in deploying an elastomeric restraint to the legs of an athlete while training on a treadmill in which a fabric panel stretched between the athlete and a vertical post behind the treadmill serves to guide and stabilize the stretched restraining elastomeric strap. While quite useful in inducing added effort during a steady state treadmill driven exercise, this combination provides little information, and thus little training utility, useful in the development of transient capabilities like those during all the movement patterns from the starting blocks to the finish. A restraint mechanism that produces continuous measurement information while tied to the athlete during all such transient patterns and that fully records all the parameters thereof is therefore extensively desired and it is one such a tethered measurement system that is described herein.